Scrimshaw and Lexicogenesis

摘要

Scrimshaw is defined as ‘handicrafts practised by sailors by way of pastime during long whaling and other voyages, and for the products of these, as small manufactured articles, carvings on bone, ivory, or shells, and the like’.1 The Oxford English Dictionary continues with this etymological note: ‘Of obscure origin; the surname Scrimshaw, if not actually the source, may have influenced the form of the word. Compare scrimshank v.’ Although systematic open-sea whaling is believed to have emerged in Europe in the late Middle Ages, perhaps in the Bay of Biscay, and found its first full expression in the Basque whaling stations on the coast of Labrador in the mid-sixteenth century, references to scrimshaw are, perhaps surprisingly, fairly recent. The first of these dates to a good three centuries later. In the following examination of the known history of this artisanal practice and its terminology, the disparate lexical evidence and popular conceptions of the craft are first briefly noted.